Client Success Story: AAA Ohio

The client had no process in place to ascertain which of the 800,000 email addresses in its database posed a threat to sender reputation and deliverability. The organization turned to AtData to help clean its email list. As a result, the organization experienced a 20% lift in engagement, an increase in deliverability to nearly 100%, and ~ $60,000 in additional value through AtData’s corrected email addresses alone.

The Challenge

AAA Ohio covers half the state of Ohio, with 760,000 members. It launched an email marketing program in 1999 with a simple email newsletter and today sends news, features and offers. In 2016, the club sent 17 million email message to nearly 600,000 recipients, using a mix of targeted and broadcast emails. The decision to invest in email address quality was an easy one for AAA Ohio, because the club knows how valuable good email addresses are for revenue, renewals, and member contact.

AAA Ohio had been building its email list since 1999 without focusing on list hygiene. The organization had been pulling data from a variety of legacy systems to build out its database. As a result, AAA Ohio suspected that they had a high number of invalid, duplicate, and deliverable but problematic addresses, which required removal. This presented a major problem for the organization because it knows that members for whom it has a working email address spend $75 more per year on average. This fact, coupled with recent news of a competitor that found itself on a blacklist, were the driving forces behind AAA Ohio’s decision to hire a trusted vendor to help it maintain a clean email list.

Solution

AAA Ohio leveraged the full service SafeToSend solution to flag 31.5% of its database as invalid or problematic and identify 2,200 toxic spamtrap addresses for suppression. After completing the hygiene process, the client experienced a multitude of benefits, including:

• A drop in the percentage of undeliverable email addresses in its database from 25% to 6.5%
• A boost in email deliverability from 97% to nearly 100%
• A 20% lift in email engagement
• An estimated $59,175 in additional value provided by 789 suggested AtData corrections.